Canadian author Margaret Atwood has a knack for picking her subjects.
Her latest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, hit the bookstores in October, less than a month after Wall Street behemoth Lehman Brothers buckled under the weight of its debts and collapsed into bankruptcy.
Other American financial giants soon found themselves begging for government assistance, while the country's stock market went into freefall.
Could there have been a better time to be writing about the world's obsession with borrowing?
"I wrote it before the crisis,” said the Canadian author, during her recent visit to Hong Kong to attend the city's annual Man International Literary Festival. “It happened to appear just at the time of the crisis.”
Even if it was just coincidence, the non-fiction release was perfectly timed.
Atwood, best known for her novels, said American newspapers fought hard for the exclusive right to publish excerpts before its release. "It was the only book available on the subject at the time," she said.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood speaks to AFP in Hong Kong
Prescience?
It was not the first time the 69-year-old, who won Britain's Booker Prize in 2000 with her multilayered family memoir The Blind Assassin, has envisioned a crisis before it hit the mainstream consciousness.
In 1984, Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel about a fundamentalist society where women were reduced to the status of child bearers and servants.
The book pre-empted the Taliban's misogynist regime in Afghanistan, which only caught the world's attention after the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001.
Her other futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake, charted the destruction of the earth by global warming, pandemics and genetic engineering. It was published in 2003, shortly before the deadly outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and bird flu and ahead of the burgeoning awareness of climate change.
Atwood insists she does not have a crystal ball and says she is simply adept at identifying recurrent themes in human history.
"These themes are not new,” she said. “I didn't invent anything.”
It’s only fair
The idea for her latest book came three years ago when Atwood noticed a barrage of adverts offering help with debt to people in the US and Canada, at the same time as the United States was funding an expensive war in Iraq.
Payback is not about debt management or high finance. Rather, it looks at the concepts of debt and fairness as the building blocks of the human society.
Atwood argues that sense of fairness, balance and justice are inherent in all cultures and religions, and were manifested in the exchange of favours, gifts, insults and revenge that preceded the existence of money.
"We long to believe that things ought to be fair – that if I lend you some money, you will pay me back," she said.
The global financial crisis was above all about the breakdown of fairness, the writer said.
"What has happened in the financial crisis is that people ignored those structural principles (of fairness),” she said. “They did things that were not equivalent, they did things that were not fair.”
In her book, Atwood uses examples from history and literature of the type of nightmares that ensue if the give-and-take balance is tipped.
An emperor who overtaxed his subjects would cause poverty, disease and revolution before the system was restored to balance.
A good contemporary example of the importance of fairness and balance was the relationship between the US and the biggest holders of its huge government debt, China, the writer said.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has recently urged the US to maintain its good credit and guarantee the safety of China's assets, she said, but America is equally dependent on China continuing to support its debt.
"It's a very interdependent thing to have such a big debt,” she said. “The two countries are joined at the hip. Their fates are now entwined.”
Polly Hui/AFP/Expatica
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Canuck author Margaret Atwood’s aptly timed new novel is about the world’s obsession with borrowing.
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